[Bug 801098] Re: Unable to create VM when .iso file is stored on external USB drive

[James Page]

Hi Louis

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
Ubuntu better.

Assuming that you are running on maverick+ the issue with kvm not being
able to access the .iso image on your external hard drive is due to the
fact that by default the kvm processes that virt-install/libvirt starts
run as 'libvirt-qemu'; when your hard drive automounts it does it in
user space which means that only your account can do anything on the
drive - including reading data which blocks libvirt/kvm access to the
iso images.

When you unmount the drive and re-mount it as root it gets a different
set of permissions which means that the libvirt-qemu account can access
the .iso images.

You could work around this by changing the settings in
/etc/libvirt/qemu.conf so that the kvm processes run as root; however
you do need to consider the security implications of this (it normally
runs as libvirt-qemu for good reasons).

I'm going to mark this ticket as 'Invalid' as I believe this is the
expected behaviour for removable drives.


** Changed in: kvm (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Invalid

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/801098

Title:
  Unable to create VM when .iso file is stored on external USB drive

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